You probably remember Simon Gascoin's story about the Aru glacier avalanches, which started from Simon's observations of the twin avalanches using the Sentinels. It was one of the big buzz pages of the blog in 2016. The first images were published here, then spread out in many scientific websites and the social networks.

The same mountain valley in Tibet is shown before and after part of a glacier sheared off on 17 July 2016. Credit: NASA/Joshua Stevens/USGS/ESA

It seems that the story finally made its way to Nature Geoscience, after a large work from many scientists lead by Andreas Kaab. Congratulations to all the team !

So, dear CESBIO colleagues, or remote sensing time series users, it is time to submit your work to this blog as a first step to future publications in Nature !

Criticizing is easy, and doing is hard, especially when trying to create a global map of croplands. Some collegues from CESBIO have worked on that subject within the Sen2Agri project, and obtained good resuts, but only at the local or country scale. Finding a method that works everywhere must clearly be much harder.
These days, I have received a lot of emails, tweets and posts about a new cropland global product at 30 m resolution, edited by USGS. I have no doubt it was a serious work from a serious team, done with appropriate terrain data and methods, validation, and of course a tremendous data processing.

But there it is, I checked it over a lot of places that I know very well, and it seems to me that the cropland mask, at least in South West France, is clearly overestimated. Is it the same in tour region ? Here are some examples :

To compute a cloud free synthesis of surface reflectances every month, a good repetitivity of observations is necessary. The weighted average method we developed at CESBIO, and which will be part of ESA's sen2agri system was coded by Cosmin Udroiu at CS Romania. It was meant to work with both Sentinel-2 sensors and an observation every fifth day. As we are still waiting for the launch of Sentinel-2B, the monthly syntheses obtained with Sentinel-2A alone really lack cloud free data.

On the left, the Sentinel-2A monthly synthesis, above Odessa (Ukraine) in May, and on the right its flag, with, in black, the areas flagged as cloud or cloud shadow. When a pixel is flagged as cloud or cloud shadow, the monthly synthesis provides the minimum blue reflectance, which tends to avoid clouds (if possible), but often selects cloud shadows.

Fortunately, the Sen2agri L3A processor is designed to work with LANDSAT 8 too, as both satellites have similar spectral bands, and as the MACCS atmospheric correction used to produce the L2A input products works for both sensors. Of course LANDSAT 8 geometric resolution is not that of Sentinel-2, so to avoid degrading Sentinel-2 imagery when LANDSAT8 data are available, we give Landsat 8 a very low weight in the weighted average. As a result, Landsat is really taken into account only when no cloud free Sentinel-2 was available during the synthesis period.

Same result as above, but including LANDSAT 8 data. A cloud free date at least is now found for every pixel. The water mask obtained from Level 2A product is a little wrong on the Landsat 8 image due to the presence of turbid waters and thin clouds. A solution for this problem will be implemented in next MACCS L2A version. Note that the monthly synthesis of both Sentinel-2 and LANDSAT-8 leaves nearly no visible artifacts on the lands.

For a better comparison of both versions, here is a little animation of composites with and without Landsat 8.

The Sen2Agri system is still in validation phase and should be released as open source next May, 6 months from now. The L3A synthesis processor will be also implemented within Theia and monthly L3A products will be distributed by Theia as it is already the case for L2A products.

Climate variability has a strong impact on maize yield. For example, the strong drought that occurred in 2016 led to lower yields across France, even for irrigated fields. Yield estimates have a significant strategic and economic importance. High spatial and temporal resolution remote sensing data are a valuable tool for providing yield estimates at a large scale.

In a recent study (Battude et al. 2016) based on optical image time series (combination of Formosat-2, Landsat-8, SPOT4-Take5 and Deimos-1, about two images per month), CESBIO researchers have developed a new method for the estimation of maize yield. A new formulation of SAFY agro-meteorological model taking into account of the observed seasonal variation of the specific leaf area (SLA) and the effective light use efficiency (ELUE) was proposed.

Results show that these modifications improve biomass estimates at local scale.

Comparison of measured and simulated Dry Aboveground Mass (DAM) with the original version of SAFY (left) and the new model version (right)

Yield estimates are compared to annual statistical values (Agreste) on two departments in the southwest of France : the Gers and the Haute-Garonne. Results show that the model reproduces well yields (R = 0.96; RRMSE = 4.6%), even if it sometimes overestimates the values for rainfed fields.

Comparison of simulated yield and Agreste values [t.ha-1] for the Gers and Haute-Garonne departments in 2013 (left) and 2014 (right), with the distinction between irrigated and rainfed fields. Standard errors associated to simulated values are reported.

GAI thus seems to be a good indicator for estimating the irrigated maize yield at regional scale. For rainfed fields, coupling SAFY with a water balance module simulating the soil water content may improve yield estimates. Sentinel-2 mission offers new perspectives and its data should improve the model estimates.